The year is 1938. Nazi troops enter Vienna, marking a turning point that will change the city forever. For its Jewish population, persecution soon reaches into every part of life: their work, their homes, their families and their hopes for the future.
It also transforms the life of a man who is now largely forgotten. As the head of Vienna’s Jewish community administration during the Nazi era, he will occupy one of the most impossible positions imaginable: trying to help his fellow Jews while being forced to answer to the men persecuting them.
His story is one of sacrifice, agonising decisions, controversy and devotion. He will help others escape, face accusations of collaboration and repeatedly return to Vienna when he has opportunities to leave. What makes a man stay—and how do we judge the choices he makes when every available path carries a terrible cost?
It is a difficult story, but one that deserves to be told. In this article, we will meet Josef Löwenherz, the leader of Vienna’s Jewish community administration, the IKG, and try to understand the impossible mission he undertook.
Before everything changed
To understand Löwenherz’s position, we first need to understand the organisation he led: the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, or in short, the IKG.
Before the Nazi takeover, its responsibilities extended far beyond synagogue services. It helped sustain schools, charitable work, medical assistance and care for people who could not support themselves. When persecution began stripping Jewish families of their livelihoods and security, these services became a lifeline.
Before 1938, this institution served a large and diverse population. Vienna’s Jewish community had grown significantly under Emperor Franz Joseph and became one of the largest in Europe. Its members differed in their religious practices, politics and social circumstances. These groups had their own debates, ambitions and disagreements.
Löwenherz was deeply involved in Jewish life in Vienna. As a lawyer and Zionist activist, he had become the community’s director, responsible for the work of its administration. His position required organisational experience and connections within Vienna and abroad.
He worked alongside Desider Friedmann, the IKG’s president from 1933, and Robert Stricker, a prominent Zionist and journalist who became vice-president in 1936. Friedmann held the presidency; Löwenherz directed the administration.
These were men accustomed to communal responsibility. But nothing in ordinary institutional life could prepare them for what happened after the annexation.
March 1938: the emergency begins
The persecution that followed the Anschluss was immediate and public.
Jewish residents were forced to scrub Vienna’s pavements while crowds watched. People were beaten, arrested and robbed. Losing a livelihood or being humiliated in the street no longer required any individual accusation. Being identified as Jewish was enough. Photographs from March and April 1938 preserve these scenes of degradation.
For families who had built their lives in Vienna, familiar surroundings suddenly offered little security. Some began seeking visas. Others attempted to reach the borders without permission or a settled plan for what would happen next.
People turned to the community because they had lost their income, feared arrest or needed to leave the country. The demands on the administration grew just as its freedom to act was being taken away.
Then the Nazis came for its leaders.
The raid on the community
On 18 March 1938, Eichmann and other Nazi personnel raided the IKG’s offices. The premises were searched, leaders were arrested and the organisation was closed. Löwenherz, Friedmann and Stricker were among those imprisoned.
The attack deprived Jewish residents of both their representatives and an essential source of assistance. At the moment they most needed someone to answer their questions, the community’s offices had been shut down.
Persecution continued during the following weeks. A contemporary report from April described Chief Rabbi Israel Taglicht being stopped after Sabbath services and forced to stand outside Jewish businesses carrying a boycott placard. Even the community’s most prominent religious figures could be publicly degraded. www.jta.org
But Eichmann recognised that a functioning Jewish administration could serve his purposes.
Löwenherz was released, and the administration was permitted to reopen under Nazi supervision in May. Its employees, records and international connections could help force Jews out of Austria. The organisation’s ability to assist people became something Eichmann could exploit.
Löwenherz returned to an office whose meaning had changed. He could organise work and direct staff, but the institution operated at the mercy of the authorities. Permission could be withdrawn. Instructions could be changed. Failure to comply could bring punishment.
Yet reopening also meant that assistance could resume.
What should he have done? Refuse a position under Nazi control, knowing that people needed the services it could still provide? Or accept it and try to secure whatever help remained possible? As I read his story, I found myself asking these questions, trying to put myself in his shoes.
He returned to work. His immediate task was to help people find a way out.
Eichmann’s supposed understanding
That task required dealings with Eichmann, who presented himself in their early encounters as someone knowledgeable about Jewish affairs and interested in Palestine.
Accounts of these meetings describe him claiming to have been born in Sarona, the German Templer settlement near Tel Aviv, and suggesting that he knew Hebrew. The Sarona claim was false; the judgment at his trial later described it as a legend he had cultivated.
For a Zionist such as Löwenherz, this apparent familiarity might suggest an opening. If Eichmann understood the organisations involved in emigration, perhaps practical arrangements could be reached.
But Eichmann’s performance did not change the balance of power. He represented the authorities who had imprisoned Löwenherz and were persecuting the people seeking his assistance.
We cannot know how much Löwenherz believed of these claims. He nevertheless had to deal with the man making them. Documents, permissions and the administration’s continued operation depended on Nazi approval.
His task was therefore to obtain something useful from a relationship in which the other side could deceive him without consequence.
Beyond the office, thousands of people were waiting for results.
Summer 1938: getting out, but going where?
The administration helped people assemble documents, seek financial assistance and investigate possible destinations. Each application brought its own difficulties, but one obstacle overshadowed the others: another country had to agree to receive the applicant.
The United States combined its German and Austrian immigration quotas, allowing a maximum of 27,370 admissions annually under that quota. By the end of June 1938, nearly 140,000 applicants were already waiting.
In July, representatives of 32 countries met at Évian to discuss the refugee crisis. Most refused to expand their immigration provisions. For people trying to escape, expressions of sympathy did not produce the permission they needed.
Löwenherz could mobilise staff and appeal to contacts abroad. He could not make a foreign government admit a family.
Meanwhile, those awaiting departure were becoming poorer. They needed food, accommodation and medical care while trying to satisfy the requirements for emigration. The community’s welfare services became part of the same emergency effort.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee provided substantial financial support. Communal employees, relief agencies and other Jewish organisations worked to turn that assistance into practical help: a place to sleep, treatment for a patient or money towards a journey.
The work could succeed. Applications were completed and people left. Those departures gave the administration a concrete reason to continue.
They also gave Eichmann results he wanted to accelerate.
August 1938: the “Vienna model”
In August, the Nazi authorities established the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. Bringing the government offices involved in departure procedures together could speed up the process considerably.
For a family desperate to escape, speed mattered. For the authorities, the purpose was forced emigration and dispossession. Jews were to be driven out, and the Jewish population was made to finance the departures, including those of impoverished emigrants.
Löwenherz now had to coordinate the community’s efforts within this increasingly organised system.
The administration needed money, destinations and completed applications. Eichmann demanded departures. A successful case could mean safety for a family while also serving the regime’s policy of expulsion.
That overlap created opportunities to help, but no dependable protection. The authorities could facilitate a procedure one day and intensify persecution the next.
In November, they did precisely that.
November 1938: Kristallnacht
On 7 November 1938, seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris. Grynszpan had learned that his parents were among the Polish Jews expelled from Germany and stranded near the Polish border. Vom Rath died two days later.
The Nazi leadership seized upon his death as a pretext for a nationwide pogrom. Presented as spontaneous public outrage, the violence was instigated and coordinated by the regime. Across Germany and annexed Austria, SA men, SS personnel, Hitler Youth members and other participants attacked Jewish people, businesses, homes and religious institutions.
The pogrom became known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” after the shattered windows littering the streets. The name captures only a fraction of the destruction: synagogues were burned, people were killed and tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested.
In Vienna, dozens of synagogues and prayer houses were destroyed or devastated. Among them was the Leopoldstädter Tempel, the city’s largest synagogue, whose monumental building had represented the presence and confidence of Jewish life in the second district.
Jewish shops were smashed and looted. People were assaulted and dragged from their homes. The destruction reached places where families had prayed, worked, studied and gathered for generations.
At the Stadttempel, the violence encountered a different Nazi priority. According to the account supplied for this article, Eichmann wanted to preserve the community offices and emigration records in the complex. SS protection prevented further destruction by the SA, although the synagogue’s interior had already been damaged.
The building’s position among neighbouring houses also mattered to its survival. Preserving the complex protected the administration and documents the Nazis needed for forced emigration; it did not reflect concern for Jewish religious life.
For Löwenherz, the aftermath brought more people requiring emergency assistance and an even more urgent struggle to arrange departures. It also gave Eichmann a terrifying new means of pressure. Löwenherz now knew exactly what a threat of another pogrom could mean.
1939: Kristallnacht becomes a threat
The release of former community leaders from concentration camps did not restore their freedom or their former offices. Friedmann and Stricker remained under house arrest in Vienna. Löwenherz could not simply resume work alongside the leadership that had existed before the Anschluss.
His own dealings with Eichmann continued under the shadow of November’s violence.
In March 1939, Eichmann complained that emigration applications had declined. According to evidence cited in his trial judgment, he gave Löwenherz two days to increase them, threatening measures resembling those of November 1938 if the numbers failed to rise.
The threat placed responsibility for further violence upon the man trying to help its potential victims. Foreign quotas, missing documents and insufficient funds were obstacles Löwenherz could work on, but could not remove by command.
To me, this episode makes his predicament more tangible than any general description of an “impossible position.” He was being told to produce results within forty-eight hours, with the memory of burning synagogues and mass arrests hanging over the demand.
The administration continued preparing applications, seeking money and working with organisations abroad. Through this collective effort, tens of thousands obtained assistance that helped them leave.
Each departure was a practical achievement. But the growing prospect of war threatened the routes on which those achievements depended.
Autumn 1939: the Nisko operation
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. War made international travel and communication more difficult, while German conquest placed new territory—and millions more Jews—under Nazi control.
That October, Eichmann became involved in the Nisko operation, an early scheme to deport Jews to the Lublin region of occupied Poland.
Löwenherz was ordered to select 1,000 able-bodied craftsmen. His account records Eichmann accompanying the instruction with promises of favourable settlement conditions. The language suggested that these men would help establish a place where others could live.
The actual operation sent deportees to a makeshift camp near Nisko. This was forced removal into occupied territory, under German control, with conditions imposed by the perpetrators.
The area became part of the General Government, the German civilian administration established over the portion of occupied Poland that Germany had not directly annexed. The term did not describe an independent Polish government; it referred to a territory governed by the Nazi occupiers.
For Löwenherz, the distinction between emigration and deportation was becoming brutally consequential. His staff had been helping applicants obtain admission elsewhere. Now the authorities demanded their participation in removing people to a destination the authorities themselves controlled.
The Nisko scheme did not develop as originally envisaged, but its interruption did not restore security. Löwenherz still had to pursue every remaining possibility of emigration while confronting instructions whose consequences were concealed behind reassuring language.
Lisbon: searching for a route across the Atlantic
As war spread across Europe, arranging escape required more than securing permission to leave Vienna. People needed transit through other countries, admission to a final destination and a ship that could actually take them there.
Neutral Portugal became a crucial point in that search. Lisbon was a major remaining Atlantic departure port and a centre for relief organisations helping refugees reach the Americas. Cuba was among the destinations explored, alongside the United States and other countries. Passage, entry documents and financial assistance had to be coordinated before a route could become usable.
This explains why Löwenherz went to Lisbon. He was negotiating with international Jewish organisations about financing and organising emigration, trying to turn the remaining connections between Vienna and the outside world into workable departures.
His presence abroad also raised a different question: would he return?
Here was a man who had experienced arrest, threats and repeated deception. Beyond Nazi-controlled territory, he had opportunities unavailable to most of the people seeking his help. Remaining abroad could offer a future in which his daily work no longer depended on the permission of their persecutors.
Yet he repeatedly went back to Vienna. In letters to his son Siegmund, he explained that he felt responsible for those who depended on him and could not abandon them.
I find that decision difficult to read as a simple act of heroism. It involved his own life and the possibility of being with his family. Choosing safety would have been understandable. Returning meant accepting renewed danger because he believed his work still mattered.
By January 1941, he was back from Lisbon. The contrast between the purpose of his journey and what awaited him was stark.
On 23 January, he reported in Berlin and raised rumours of impending deportations from Vienna. Eichmann’s deputy, Rolf Günther, dismissed them, although the decision had already been taken. On 1 February, officials in Vienna informed Löwenherz that deportations were planned. The first transport of that year’s wave left on 15 February.
He had been seeking ways to finance escape. He returned to orders for forced removal.
1941: the possibilities close
During the spring of 1941, deportations and attempts to arrange emigration continued alongside each other. The administration still searched for destinations while caring for people whose departure could not be secured.
As persecution intensified, the distinction between an application for refuge and an order for deportation became a matter of immediate personal danger. A family could be waiting for documents when the authorities ordered its removal.
In October, the Nazi regime prohibited Jewish emigration. The principal route around which Löwenherz had organised so much of his work was now formally closed.
That December, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war; Germany then declared war on the United States. This further disrupted the international relationships on which relief work depended. The Joint could no longer operate legally in enemy countries. Its work continued through Lisbon and other channels, but the arrangements that had supported assistance inside Nazi-controlled territory were severely restricted.
Refugees had already faced suspicion and increasingly demanding immigration procedures. Now war between Germany and the United States added another barrier to communication, financial assistance and the hope of reaching relatives overseas.
For Löwenherz, the mission was contracting. Organising escape had given his administration a goal that could be measured in departures. Increasingly, he was trying to obtain postponements, exemptions and enough protection to keep essential services running.
Within the community offices, Zimmer 8—Room 8—became a centre for deportation-related administration. Historian Dieter J. Hecht describes employees copying lists supplied by the Nazi authorities and dealing with questions about communal workers who might receive temporary protection.
A successful appeal could give someone more time. Retaining a doctor or nurse could preserve care for many others. But the authorities could reject a request or withdraw an exemption.
What would it feel like to ask for a relative’s protection and learn that someone else had received it instead? Fear could become anger at the officials within reach—the Jewish employees handling the paperwork and communicating decisions.
I think we have to take that anger seriously. People were pleading for their families. An explanation of administrative limits could not make a refusal bearable.
At the same time, those limits determined what Löwenherz could achieve. He could appeal and sometimes influence an individual outcome. The Nazis controlled the deportations and held the final authority over the people on the lists.
1942–1944: a community dismantled
During 1942, deportations devastated the remaining Jewish population. Stricker was sent to Theresienstadt in September.
In October, the Nazis dissolved the community organisation. Its remaining responsibilities passed to a council of elders chaired by Löwenherz. They included care for remaining children’s and elderly people’s institutions, alongside the execution of Nazi orders.
There were still people needing food, accommodation and medical attention. Keeping those services functioning required staff, supplies and permission from the same authorities dismantling Jewish communal life.
Löwenherz’s responsibility continued even as the possibilities available to him contracted.
In 1944, Stricker and his wife Paula were deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and murdered. Desider Friedmann was also murdered at Auschwitz.
The men who had once helped lead an established community had been imprisoned, displaced and killed. Their standing and experience had offered no lasting protection.
Löwenherz remained in Vienna. His survival should not be mistaken for evidence that his position had been secure. The regime continued to use his administrative work; that usefulness never amounted to a dependable promise of safety.
After liberation: explaining why he stayed
Löwenherz survived until liberation in 1945. After years of answering to Nazi officials, he was now required to defend his conduct before others.
In May, Soviet authorities arrested him. Investigations into his wartime activities followed in Prague. The accusations were subsequently refuted, and he was able to leave with Sophie. They eventually settled in New York, joining their children in the United States.
For Löwenherz, leaving Europe did not mean leaving the questions behind.
Historian Doron Rabinovici describes him continuing to feel compelled to justify his actions when he encountered Viennese Jews. He had survived and remained in office while so many others had been deported and murdered. He had to explain what he had attempted, what he had been forced to do and why he had believed that continuing his work could help.
Reading his story, I keep returning to the journeys from which he could have stayed away. They make it difficult to reduce his conduct to a desire to preserve his position. He had opportunities to seek safety, and he explained his returns through the people who needed him.
That does not settle every question about his decisions. It gives us something essential to consider when judging them.
We can follow the progression of his mission: helping a persecuted population escape, supporting those still waiting, appealing for people threatened with deportation and maintaining care for the remnants of a devastated community. At every stage, the authorities could turn the organisation’s work towards their own purposes.
Would I have returned? I cannot honestly say. I would want to believe that I could recognise when staying helped others and when it exposed them—or my own family—to further danger. Löwenherz had to make those decisions without the clarity that hindsight promises us.
What stays with me is his persistence in doing work that could still help someone, even as its possibilities diminished. A departure, an exemption, treatment for a patient: these were real outcomes, although they could never match the scale of the catastrophe.
Josef Löwenherz could not save the community he served from destruction. He did help sustain an organisation through which many obtained assistance and escape. Remembering him means allowing both truths to stand—and recognising the burden carried by a man who repeatedly returned because he believed that people still needed him.
